The Success and Failure of Picasso

Front Cover
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Dec 21, 2011 - Biography & Autobiography - 240 pages
   At the height of his powers, Pablo Picasso was the artist as revolutionary, breaking through the niceties of form in order to mount a direct challenge to the values of his time. At the height of his fame, he was the artist as royalty: incalculably wealthy, universally idolized−and wholly isolated.
   In this stunning critical assessment, John Berger−one of this century's most insightful cultural historians−trains his penetrating gaze upon this most prodigious and enigmatic painter and on the Spanish landscape and very particular culture that shpaed his life and work. Writing with a novelist's sensuous evocation of character and detail, and drawing on an erudition that embraces history, politics, and art, Berger follows Picasso from his childhood in Malaga to the Blue Period and Cubism, from the creation of Guernica to the pained etchings of his final years. He gives us the full measure of Picasso's triumphs and an unsparing reckoning of their cost−in exile, in loneliness, and in a desolation that drove him, in his last works, into an old man's furious and desperate frenzy at the beauty of what he could no longer create.
 

Contents

Orpheus and Eurydice 1650 Louvre Paris
53
Robert Delaunay The Eiffel Tower 1910 Guggenheim Museum
63
Les Demoiselles dAvignon 1907 Museum of Modern Art
71
Nude 19078 Madame Cuttoli collection
77
Curtain for Parade 1917 Musée National dArt Moderne
84
Women at the Fountain 1921
96
Bull Horse and Female Matador 1934
103
The Triumph of Pan 16389 Louvre Paris
106
Nude on a Black Couch 1932 Mrs Meric Gallery Paris
155
Woman in a Red Armchair 1932 reproduced by courtesy c
156
Nude 1933
158
Head of Woman bronze 19312 private collection
159
Sculptor and Model Resting 1933
160
Page of drawings 1936
161
Young Girl and Minotaur 19545
163
Echo of a Scream 1937 Museum of Modern Art New York gift of Edward M M Warburg
166

Bacchanale 1944 private collection
107
The Mirror 1932 private collection
108
Weeping Head 1957 on extended loan to the Museum of Modern Art New York from the artist
109
Figure 1939 Othmar Huber collection Glarus Switzerland
110
Triptych 1946 Musée Grimaldi Antibes
112
The Feast of the Gods 1514 National Gallery of Art Washington D C Widener collection
113
Massacre in Korea 1951
114
Peace 1952 Temple de la Paix Wallauris France
115
Shepherd and Nymph c 1570 Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna
116
Composition aur deur perroquets 19359 Musée National dArt Moderne Paris
118
Delacroix Horse Frightened by a Storm 1824 National Museum Budapest
123
The Bird 1915 Museum of Modern Art New York
127
Illustration to Aimé Césaires Corps perdu 1950
137
The Immaculate Conception Uffizi Florence
141
The Race 1922 private collection
142
Figure 1927 private collection
144
Woman in an Armchair 1929 private collection
145
Girls with a Toy Boat 1937 Peggy Guggenheim collection Venice
146
Guernica detail 1937 on extended loan to the Museum of Modern Art New York from the artist
147
Nude Dressing Her Hair 1940 Mrs Bertram Smith collection
148
Nude with a Musician 1942 Musée National dArt Moderne Paris
149
First Steps 1945 Yale University Art Gallery
151
Portrait of Mrs H P 1952 private collection
152
Portrait of the Chief Superintendent of the Asylum at Saint Remy 1889 Mrs DübiMüller collection
153
Bull Horse and Female Matador 1934
167
Crying Woman 1937
168
Stilllife with Bulls Skull 1942 the estate of André Lefèvr collection
170
Dove poster
174
Delacroix Les Femmes dAlger 1834 Louvre Paris
182
Las Meninas 1656 Museo del Prado Madrid
184
Bullfight 1934 Victor W Ganz collection
185
Nude and Old Clown 21 December 1953
187
Young Woman and Monkey 3 January 1954
189
Young Woman and Cupid with Mask 5 January 1954
190
Young Woman with Cupids 5 January 1954
191
Girl Clown Donkey and Monkey 10 January 1954
192
Old Clown and Couple 10 January 1954
193
Couple with Masks 24 January 1954
194
Old Man and Young Woman with Masks 25 January 1954 19
195
Girl Clown Mask and Monkey 25 January 1954
196
Painter and Model 24 December 1955
198
Painter and Model 25 December 1953
199
Woman Apple Monkey Man 26 January 1954
200
Woman and Monkey Painting 10 January 1954
201
Woman with Bare Breasts Museo del Prado Madrid 21
211
Vanity of the World 1515 Alte Pinakothek Munich
212
Nu couché 5 October 1972 Musée Picasso Paris
215
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About the author (2011)

John Berger was born in London in 1926. He is well known for his novels and stories as well as for his works of nonfiction, including several volumes of art criticism. His first novel, A Painter of Our Time, was published in 1958, and since then his books have included Ways of Seeing, the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours, and the novel G., which won the Booker Prize in 1972. In 1962 he left Britain permanently, and lived in a small village in the French Alps. He died in 2017.

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